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Tuesday, 8 November 2016

Six questions for Catherine Chidgey

Catherine Chidgey (photo by Fiona Pardington)

Could you start by telling me about the genesis for The Wish Child? Is this a period of
history you’ve always wanted to write about?

I didn’t deliberately sit down and think
right, now I’d better produce a WW2 novel, but in hindsight it seems natural that
my work took that direction. My father was a child during the war and as an
adult he had a particular interest in the period, so I grew up exposed to books
and documentaries about it.

I studied German at school and at Victoria, and
when I was 16 I spent three months on exchange in Germany. One of my host families
lived in a farmhouse near Lüneburg, and some aspects of my time with them have
made their way into the book. In particular I remember Herr K talking to me one
day about the war. It was just the two of us, and he told me about his
experiences fighting in Russia – he said there was very little for the soldiers
to eat, and when they came to a field of watermelon they fell on them and
gorged themselves, they were so hungry. He also said that if he hadn’t killed,
it would have been an act of suicide. That conversation stayed with me.

Then in
1993 I went to Berlin to study, and found myself living in a city in which the
past – and in particular the war – seemed always present, always visible. You
could still see bomb damage and shrapnel marks and bullet holes on the buildings,
particularly in the east, and Sachsenhausen concentration camp lay just to the
north of the city. One of the professors at my university showed us a campus
building – now the department of Political Science – that had been the site of
medical experiments during the Third Reich. He also took us on a trip to
Buchenwald concentration camp, purportedly built around Goethe’s famous oak
tree; we stayed overnight in the former SS quarters. It was powerful stuff for
a fledgling writer. I remember, too, seeing a beautiful old Berlin building that had
been bombed in the war; the façade featured caryatids in the form of children
who were holding up the windows, but they were badly damaged. It seemed to
suggest something rather poignant about a child’s experience of war, and I
tucked it away to use in my writing.

The real spark for the novel came, though,
when I stumbled across a reference to the mysterious figure who narrates the
book. I realised I had to give this forgotten person a voice, but at first I
was frustrated when researching him; the sources did not agree on the facts of
his life and death, or even on his name or gender. One story contradicted
another. In the end, however, these very contradictions were a gift, informing
and shaping the novel.

The Wish Child is an
incredibly complex, textured piece of writing – all these delicate plot threads
that slowly weave together to form an incredible tapestry about war and
violence, and love and friendship and the consequences of bad deeds.How did you go about creating such a dense,
full story? How long did it take you to write it?

This particular child demanded rather a long gestation – 13 years. That
was partly due to life getting in the way, but also because of the intricacy of
the story I wanted to tell. It took some time to find its voice – it started
off as quite a different book, actually, about a boy whose mother was a film
star in Nazi Germany – but those sections ended up on the cutting-room floor. I
don’t see that as wasted time, though – what you remove from a book defines it
as much as what remains.

Gottlieb Heilmann’s job as Senior Retrospective Editor, Publications
Division, is a terrifying illustration and metaphor for how history gets
cleaned up, and erased under totalitarian leadership – you even have him
erasing the word ‘God’ from the Bible! I think you made this job up?It’s a marvelous creation to have in a novel
and for a writer to play with.

I did invent Gottlieb’s job, yes – it’s one of a few instances in the
book that verge on magical realism. He methodically cuts forbidden words from
books, and as the war progresses the number of words on the forbidden list
increases. When we talk about Germany under Hitler, we often use words like
‘unbelievable’ or ‘unthinkable’. We ask ourselves how something so unimaginable
could have happened. The Germany of The
Wish Child, therefore, although historically accurate in many respects, is
in other respects not quite real. It
was a way for me to comment on the absurdity of a regime in which language and
meaning were routinely manipulated and abused – ‘special treatment’ meant execution by
lethal gas; ‘protective custody’ meant anything but.

You’re a German speaker? And reader? How did you go about creating the
texture of 1940s Germany? I would think that taking a
period in history that is not only well documented in non-fiction, but also in
fiction, has its hazards and possibly makes the novelist’s job harder because
it can seem like somewhere we’ve all been before, which it doesn’t here.

I was already familiar with Germany, both rural and metropolitan, and
of course a lot of the architecture I encountered when I lived there was
present during the period – so I drew on my memories of particular structures,
and wandered around Google Maps (a wonderful tool for writers). I also immersed
myself in the everyday literature and ephemera of the period – ration booklets,
advertising, women’s magazines, menus, children’s books, as well as eye-witness
accounts. Being able to read German obviously came in very handy with that sort
of research. The internet has allowed me to access some fascinating and obscure
documents that would have been difficult to find otherwise – a guide for
leaders of Hitler Youth groups for girls, for instance, on appropriate
activities for 10-year-olds (singing, sewing, learning about the life of Adolf
Hitler), or a fairly deranged propaganda leaflet produced in the final
desperate months of the war in which ‘two possibilities’ are presented to
Berliners – the options including hanging themselves or being liquidated by the
Russian army.

Your story is a story of ordinary Nazi families, and how the WW2 affected
them. It’s a fine balancing act to strike between representing the banality of
evil and not reducing the evil. I have a feeling that the point of view of the
children is important here as their understanding of what is going on is
limited, but tell me, how did you go about making ground that feels fresh to
tread here? Is this something you even thought about?

I was aware that many writers before me have trod this terrain, yes –
but I always try to come at my writing from an original angle. Discovering the
narrator’s story when I was researching was a real turning point – I knew
straight away that it belonged in the novel, and indeed that this cryptic voice
formed the heart of the novel, allowing me to shift in and out of the minds of
the two children and their parents. I can’t say too much more than that without
giving the game away, though! Something else I did was to splice in quotes from
songs, poems, speeches of the period – sometimes overtly, but often
subliminally. So for instance, a comment by Hitler on the attractiveness of
German children finds its way into the mouth of Erich’s mother; a teacher
quotes a speech by Goebbels as if the words are her own. This was a way of expressing
something of the zeitgeist, and showing how completely evil can penetrate the
attitudes of ‘ordinary’ people; I hope, too, that it lends the writing a kind
of heightened immediacy.

It’s been thirteen years since your third novel, The Transformation, was published. How does it feel to be releasing
your fourth novel?

I feel relieved, nervous, excited. The book has been part of my life
for so long – I am more than ready to let this child find its way in the world.

The Wish Child by Catherine Chidgey is available for purchase from 10 November at all good bookshops and through our online bookstore.